How and Why the Testing Industry itself Cheats - NOT Our Students!

"Once I attended a range-finding meeting with other test-scoring experts and English professors from around the country, the bunch of us trying to figure out how to score writing samples for a national test. After that group of experienced test scorers and esteemed writing teachers had hammered out some consensus regarding the writing rubric and writing samples we'd been reviewing, we were told we were scoring "wrong." We test-scoring experts and writing teachers were told our scoring wasn't matching the predictions of the omniscient psychometricians (statisticians/testing gurus), and we were told we had to match those predictions even though the pyschometricians had never actually seen the student responses." -

Dear friends,

We often hear “news” stories about both school principals and/or teachers either submitting phony test results or actually helping students “cheat”, in order to prevent their schools from being penalized for having poor test scores. Well, it seems that the actual cheating starts long before the tests are even distributed to the schools.

Still, at what point will our unscrupulous federal politicians and the corporations who sponsor them decide to stop the charade that is the Testing Industry and allow the aforementioned school principals and teachers to exercise their passions and educate our children?

On the link below, please see the article by Todd Farley. He is the author of "Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry.". Farley's opinions have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post and Education Week. Cheers!

G. Djata Bumpus
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/for-profit-standardized-testing-industry-cant-be-trusted/1230845